Highlights—November 1, 2014

Forbes:

Editor's note: I've been producing these "highlights" about IBM for nearly fifteen years, starting back in 1999 when Lou Gerstner screwed long-term employees out of their defined-benefit pensions and lifetime retiree medical benefits. Employees inside IBM, and in particular those that joined the Alliance@IBM, have known for years what the mainstream financial press is just now catching onto. Of all the articles written about IBM's disappointing third-quarter results, Mr. Denning's article best describes what's happened to IBM during the Palmisano and Rometty years. (And, I would argue, the Gerstner years.) I don't usually "fully extract" an article of this length, but in this case I found it impossible to edit anything out. Thank you, Mr. Denning, for telling Wall Street what we current and former IBMers have been trying to tell the world for years.

Full excerpt: In 1787, Empress Catherine II of Russia made an unprecedented six-month trip to Crimea, the “New Russia,” with her court and some foreign ambassadors. The area had recently been devastated by war. Amid fears of a new war, the purpose of the trip was to impress Russia’s allies how prosperous the region had become as a result of rebuilding the region and bringing in Russian settlers.

The Empress was accompanied on the trip by the official who had been responsible for rebuilding the region and bringing in Russian settlers. The official, Grigory Potemkin, happily combined this official role with his unofficial function of bedroom companion and lover of the sex-hungry Empress.

Potemkin’s problem on the visit was that the reconstruction of the area was not as far along as desired. Not wanting to disappoint his demanding imperial mistress, and being an energetic fellow, he implemented an ingenious scheme. He had a team of workers develop some “portable villages.” Prior to the arrival of the Empress’s barge, Potemkin’s men, dressed up as peasants, would show up at the site and assemble a village. At night, in the midst of the barren territory, the fake settlements with their glowing fires would comfort the Empress and her foreign entourage. Once the Empress’s barge had departed, the village would be disassembled and rebuilt downstream overnight for the imperial visit the next day.

The stratagem was a personal success for Potemkin. The Empress was sufficiently pleased with his multiple services that he solidified his hold on power. Strategically for Russia, however, it was otherwise. The visiting ambassadors detected the difference between the real and the fake buildings and Potemkin’s deception was in due course exposed by his political opponents. Shortly after the imperial visit, the region was once again plunged into a war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

IBM’s Potemkin prosperity. Fast forward a couple of hundred years to the troubles of IBM, the once-iconic technology giant, as its CEO, Ginni Rometty, struggles to convince a skeptical stock market that her tricks of financial engineering, share buybacks, tax gadgets, cost-cutting and hastily assembled acquisitions and innovation initiatives have put IBM on the path towards prosperity.

The problem is that after ten successive quarters of falling revenues, the pretense that everything is on track for the accomplishment of “Roadmap 2015,” in which IBM’s earnings would double to reach $20 per share, can no longer be maintained. Rometty announced last week what has been obvious for some time: IBM won’t hit the target after all.

She also announced that, rather than sell or shutter its chip division, it would actually pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion to take the division off its hands, while also taking a $4.7 billion charge.

“At the end of the day,” said Rometty in an interview with CNBC last week, “this is about returning value to shareholders.” Yet to many observers, the single-minded focus on returning value to shareholders is precisely what is killing IBM–and destroying real shareholder value.

IBM’s focus on boosting the share price has been built on a foundation of declining revenues, capability-crippling offshoring, fading technical competence, sagging staff morale, massive debt-financed share buybacks, pervasive non-standard accounting practices, tax-reduction gadgets, a debt-equity ratio of nearly 174 percent, a broken business model and a flawed forward strategy. Those Potemkin-style tactics can only work for so long, before the business reality becomes evident to all. With IBM’s stock down more than 10 percent over the last week, that day may have already arrived.

IBM’s staff speak. “We have a very clear strategy,” said Rometty last week, “about how to take this company to the future and more than a strategy, a whole list of bold actions we have taken, one after another this year. And when you’re clear with your workforce and you engage them, that’s how you move them swiftly.”

Among Rometty’s problems is the testimony of the staff and executives involved in the internal re-jiggering of IBM’s affairs. If the anecdotal testimony of staff is to be believed, IBM’s workers are far from being engaged. Some recent examples of IBM staff views:

“IBM is delaying and not paying out bonuses that engagement teams have earned. Example, it used to be when you won a deal, your bonus would be paid within 2 months or so. Today, folks that closed out an engagement back in January are still waiting on bonus payment. When management is asked about it, they keep repeating the party line, ‘They are still working on it.’ In another cost cutting measure, the 401K company contribution is now only paid out once per year (December 15).”

“The most recent (just this week) example of cost cutting measure designed to show profitability, is the selection of x number of employees that some executive (not your manager) has found to be lacking in skills essential to perform their job. They’ve implemented a 10 percent pay cut for 6 months so that those employees can dedicate up to one day per week to training. The logic is that since you will be dedicating only 90 percent of your time on your main job, you therefore deserve a 10 percent pay reduction. Keep in mind that this is not based on any performance deficiency and no mention of exactly what skills the employee is weak in. Keep in mind also that an average work week at IBM far exceeds 40 hours, it’s more like 60 to 70 hours when on an engagement. So telling someone that they will only spend 90 percent of their time on what they call real work is meaningless. But it’s c’est la vie at today’s IBM.”

“The company has imposed draconian measures to cut costs. As a manager you did your plan for the coming year and estimated the resources required. In the end you were given higher objectives and fewer resources. It was a purely financial game. The impact was exacerbated as the same game was repeated quarter after quarter.”

“Today’s IBM is able to buy the right assets; but we have a very hard time to come up with great products ourselves. And why is that? It’s because the workforce is slashed all over the place. And the people that remain have to fight budget constraints and all kinds of crazy stuff, every other day in order to do the job they are paid for.”

“Rometty only speaks to screened (and terrified) employee audiences and the rest of us are forced to watch videos of this.”

“Execs are selling millions of shares and options, while rewards to the vast majority of employees are now given in the form of ‘Blue Points,’ which can be saved up and used to pick gifts out of a catalog. Employee morale couldn’t be worse.”

“IBM has a ‘caste’ system.” Many of the executives are regarded as over-paid, damage-creating, unable-to-listen psychopaths. IBM is beyond cultural bankruptcy. When a company goes into ‘cultural bankruptcy’; you can start the countdown for the financial meltdown.”

“So why are some of us still here? Because working for IBM was that good. We keep hoping things will get fixed but they aren’t. Lower and middle management are now powerless puppets who are forced to act as cheerleaders for the ‘new’ IBM. (The worst part is that the managers are bad actors.) It’s sad. Really, really sad.”

Whether or not these statements are true in every detail or across the board is beside the point. The perception among staff that they are true has the same corrosive effect.

A broken business model. Some staff also question whether IBM’s business model is sound:

“Where does IBM get its revenue numbers? Typically from the top 150 global accounts called Core Accounts. These are the largest corporations in the world who are heavily invested in their mainframe systems. IBM have a very elaborate deal-making process that locks these clients in for 3-5 years against their will and based upon the fact that zOS software is never owned by the customer. If you add to this license compliance actions (audits) you then have the bulk of their numbers.”

“To be sure IBM does sell products into the Fortune 1000 and mid market, but the deals are few and far between, because IBM simply cannot compete. These are the markets where they are getting killed, where the reps are not nearly compensated at market rates.”

“Finally, business partners are pulling back from IBM as IBM sells off its hardware lines and pulls back from customer data centers. They have their pricing strategy incorrect for the cloud. So there is a complete vacuum outside of the core accounts.”

“IBM is facing an enormous set of hurdles within the next 2 years. As for the large IBM Core accounts who routinely are held for ransom? They are likely starting to wake up as cloud expands its role.”

“I left IBM to be the first guy in a SaaS start up that was quickly acquired at our target buy-out. It was great to be in a scenario where you could actually sell and the customer could easily understand our value proposition.”

Rometty insisted last week that IBM’ has made “very bold moves” since she became chief executive— billions of dollars for data analysis software and skills, cloud computing, Watson artificial intelligence technology and so on. “The strategy is correct,” she said. “Now it’s our speed of execution that needs to improve.” But if the disaffected workforce doesn’t believe the strategy, implementing it won’t be easy.

The Buffett factor. The key to IBM’s game-plan in “delivering value to investors” has been “RoadMap 2015”, which promised a doubling of the earnings per share by 2015. “Roadmap 2015” is what induced Warren Buffett to invest more than $10 billion in IBM in 2011, along with many other investors, who were impressed with the methodical way in which IBM was able to boost earnings per share. (Buffett’s investment was striking because of his long-standing and publicly announced aversion to investing in technology, which he admitted he didn’t understand.)

“The best business returns,” says Buffett, “are usually achieved by companies that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago.” Put another way, “IBM had that stickiness and indispensability to many large corporate and government institutions worldwide.” The question is whether this way of doing business is coming to the end of its effective life. Today clients show signs of preferring flexibility to stickiness.

IBM is used to operating in a world where new versions of software come out every few years, making it difficult to get out of a license when company data depended on it. The emerging world of cloud computing will require greater agility.

How long Warren Buffett will stick with a losing business model remains a question. Some analysts speculated on CNBC’s Squawkbox last week that Buffett may already be selling some of his stake. If the share price continues to tank, he’s likely to pull out entirely.

The Palmisano factor. Rometty of course didn’t invent “Roadmap 2015.” She inherited it from her predecessor CEO, Sam Palmisano, who retired from IBM with compensation estimated at $225 million, including the options, restricted stock, pensions, deferred compensation, bells and whistles.

Palmisano was, according to HBR in 2006, “a true-blue IBMer, who started at the company in 1973 as a salesman in Baltimore,” with “a visceral attachment to the firm.” He is “a results-driven, make-it-rain, close-the-deal sort of guy.” He also famously held a ValuesJam, in which thousands of IBM’s employees joined in an open debate about the very nature of the computer giant and what it stood for. At the conclusion, Palmisano declared IBM’s commitment to three values: “Dedication to every client’s success,” “Innovation that matters,” and “Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships.”

However critics—and many staff—suggest that what drove actual decision-making at IBM under Palmisano was not so much “clients”, “innovation” or “trust’, but a relentless drive to grow earnings per share, no matter what the cost.

Palmisano’s June 2014 HBR interview corroborates this diagnosis. In the long interview, Palmisano never once mentioned the word “client” or “trust”. He mentions “innovation” only once, and then to point out how little money it involves in the overall scheme of things. “Your innovation and long-term investments are a very small portion of the SG&A [selling, general, and administrative expenses] pot—maybe 4 percent.” Somehow IBM’s values got lost in the shuffle.

Many see Palmisano as the origin of today’s problems. Far from valuing trust, IBM, under his watch, developed a culture of distrust, in which nobody dared to talk their mind. Executives just wanted to hear the “right” story. Rometty is simply following in Palmisano’s tracks.

Offshoring has been implemented with ruthless brutality. “US employees,” says one former executive, “were asked to train their successors and then fired. The offshoring was based on Palmisano’s ideology of the ‘Globally Integrated Enterprise’ (GIE) which claims that it does not matter anymore where you put your operations. You can stitch the company together by information technology. This was used for IBM’s offshoring and customer projects where they took out cost by putting most of the resources in overseas call and competence centers. This was complemented by global processes that never worked properly. Through massive offshoring, IBM lost the ‘soul’ that it once had in days of Thomas Watson Sr.”

The “unprecedented pace of change”. “The pace of change,” said Rometty in her interview with CNBC last week, “is unprecedented.”

In the same interview, she also said, “At the end of the day, this is about returning value to shareholders.” In the interview, the client seems almost like an afterthought. By not putting the client front and center, the risk is that the pace of change will always be “unprecedented.” IBM will be continually surprised by what is happening in the marketplace.

Thus Amazon launched its cloud computing services in 2008. IBM only discovered the cloud in 2011 and has struggled to keep up ever since. After losing a lucrative CIA cloud project to Amazon—a deal that should have been a shoe-in for IBM, given its history and customer relationships—IBM acquired a small competitor, SoftLayer, to provide the services its customers were demanding, which IBM itself couldn’t provide. But SoftLayer itself was arguably already behind the curve and over-priced. And even if IBM ever does catch up in cloud-computing , the cloud is likely to be such a thin-margined industry that it won’t sustain the profit margins IBM is hoping to achieve.

Is it a surprise that Rometty reported last week that results were down because IBM’s clients were “not ready to make a decision”? Or another surprise: clients have been asking for “more flexibility in our software to deploy it for new workloads”? And surprise of all surprises in 2014: IBM has discovered that clients want “mobile.” Which century is IBM’s management living in?

IBM is systematically playing catch-up in a world where catch-up is ultimately a losing game. Instead, IBM needs to answer Peter Thiel’s questions: what can IBM do that no one else is doing? What secret does IBM know that no one else knows?

Rometty’s attempted answer seems to be the very old response of Lou Gerstner back in 1994: we can help big firms integrate all this confusing technology stuff so that they just don’t have to worry about it: leave it to IBM.

“Playing to win on cloud,” said Rometty last week in her CNBC interview with David Faber, is what IBM is about. “We have always said there would be three things that would make a difference on cloud. It would be hybrid, meaning you would connect these new ideas, these new innovations to your existing systems. Data, it would matter it would really be about data. And security. All that is coming to be now. And that is exactly the strengths and exactly what we built for.”

Huddled together on a sinking ship. Yet implicit in Rometty’s summary is a philosophy of business as usual. It involves a set of “core accounts”, namely, big firms who don’t understand software and who are scared to death of everything that it is doing to their businesses. They are hoping that IBM can somehow protect them by providing a safe and stable environment and they are willing to pay a premium if IBM can do it. That will supposedly enable them to get back to their “real business” of pushing products at customers and making money.

One problem is that when IBM itself is moving so slowly, with such a disaffected workforce, and with no apparent mastery as to what is going on, let alone any clear vision as to what is coming next, the safety and security that IBM promises to its fellow mastodons constitute an illusion. IBM is just as out of touch as they are. When there are much cheaper and more flexible solutions, the option of switching looks ever more attractive, as the pressures mount on all the big firms to deliver “better, faster, cheaper, light, more mobile, more personalized and more convenient.” In this environment, the extravagant premiums that IBM is hoping to extract for sticking with IBM look ever more fragile.

The reality is that IBM and its core accounts are huddled together on sinking ship that is basically out of touch with the marketplace, with an obsolete approach to management (maximizing shareholder value and hierarchical bureaucracy) and frightened of the future. They had all hoped that by jacking up their share prices through Potemkin-style tricks of financial engineering, share buybacks and free government money, no one would notice their real underlying problems. But change is coming, inexorably.

The problem they face is that technology isn’t any longer something that can be kept locked up in some back room, overseen by IBM. Whether these firms like it or want it or will admit it, all organizations are now software organizations. All of these firms’ systems run on software. The customers of all these firms want fast, convenient higher quality mobile solutions that only software can provide. There is no safe space where software can be contained, no back room where the glacial progress of IBM’s mainframes can reign. “Software,” as Marc Andreessen quipped in 2011, “is eating the world.”

In this emerging software-driven world, a new kind of management is required. It focuses customer delight as the new bottom line of the firm’s business. It delivers greater shareholder value, not as the goal but as the result. IBM will have to learn how to disrupt its own cash cows and rapidly develop new products that have not even been heard of. Innovation will need to happen on a continuous basis.

For a certain period, the tricks of financial engineering could fool some of the people some of the time that the ship wasn’t taking on water or losing velocity. But the moment of truth is fast approaching for IBM, just as it is for IBM’s core clients. The future is rapidly evolving software. All organizations will need to learn to live with it and master it. There is no safe haven. IBM can’t provide it. That era is over.

Potemkin-style financial engineering won’t save these firms. Maximizing shareholder value by jacking up the share price won’t help for long. Nor is the “corporate cocaine” of share buybacks the solution.

Does IBM have a future? Yet the case isn’t hopeless. Despite the profound problems IBM now faces, the firm still has tremendous resources and knowledge, in particular in R&D. It enjoys a huge base of customers who are losing patience but who have not yet given up on IBM. The firms that constitute the Global Accounts have long-term relationships with IBM and would prefer to stay with IBM if IBM could be a viable partner in the new world. They see IBM as one of the few companies that can actually run big complex data centers. IBM also has immense strengths in the field of High Performance Computing. Even critics concede that IBM still has the most secure and reliable software for mainframe systems and middleware.

IBM needs to build on its strengths. IBM was once a great company that respected and rewarded its employees and served its communities and society. It’s a company that still has the power to change the world if only it would choose to.

Yet it’s hard to see how it can accomplish this with the current management team or the current board and their obsolete management philosophy. It has been evident for some time that IBM has been heading down the wrong path. Why did they just watch and not act? According to Nick Summers at Bloomberg BusinessWeek, IBM’s leadership has been “like a driver obeying the commands of a GPS system even as passengers shout that the car is clearly headed toward a ditch.”

It’s time to get back to Tom Watson Sr.’s philosophy of putting the customer first among stakeholders and earning a real living again, but in a very different context with a very different approach to management.

IBM has made other major transitions in its long life—last time with an outside CEO.

Maybe it’s time for leadership with a different vision?

Selected reader comments follow:

rshimizu20: I am convinced more than ever now that it is time for Ginni Rometty to go. This “earnings per share at any cost” is cannibalizing IBM. Ginni’s solution is to cut the core of IBM no matter how much it demoralizes the IBM staff. Ginni is making progress with cloud computing and data analytics. But when it comes to internal operations, IBM is a mess now.

Steve Denning: Dear rshimizu20, Thanks for your comment. I agree with you that IBM needs a different kind of leadership now. Based on performance, it is hard to envisage Rometty providing it, but in principle, there is no reason why not. The elements of the required leadership are now fairly clear. They have been delineated in this column, with considerable frequency. Exemplars are now everywhere. The required leadership does however involve a different way of thinking, speaking and acting in the workplace as compared to what we have seen from Rometty to date. But if she were to change, the problems are eminently fixable and IBM could be rescued, as the article points out. The first step is to accept that the firm is on the wrong course.

rshimizu20: I really do not see this happening. Ginni Rometty seems to caught up in her own beliefs to change. She talks how IBM is reinventing itself. but the problem is that internal operations are not changing or at least not for the better. Part of the problem is her decision to assume the role of chairman and CEO. So therefore there is no one to help guide her.

Steve Denning: “There is no one there to help guide her.” The board should be helping, although I don’t see any sign of that.

sam19L: Agree, it can be fixed, but, as you mention in the article, it seems like Rometty and company are unshaken in their orthodoxy of returning “value” to shareholders. They may have quietly gotten rid of the 2015 goal, because it was too ridiculous for them to ignore with the huge amounts of debt it required, but they still seem to think of it as a set back with the general strategy of buybacks, draconian cuts, lack of investment, etc being the correct path.

There seems to be a cognitive dissonance at the top of IBM. On the one hand they recognize the “unprecedented change” in the industry and the need to reinvent, but they think they will be able to thread the needle and continue buybacks/dividends even as their competitors invest their free cash flow in acquisitions, more sales staff, more development, etc.

It is not that complex. IBM needs to invest free cash flow in the business to grow and be relevant… in substantial quantities. If they don’t reinvest at the same levels at their competitors, they will, over time, continue to shrink and their technologies will become obsolete. Thus far they have spent inadequately on investing in the business and the results have been inadequate. Exactly what you would expect.

Steve Denning: Dear Sam19, Thanks for your comment. I agree that the IBM story as told by Rometty doesn’t hang together, as the article points out. “Cognitive dissonance” is one way–a fairly polite way–of describing the situation.

As to whether they are not spending enough on innovation, I wonder whether it is the amount or the quality. The way Rometty talks, it’s like she’s throwing money at possible opportunities, in the hope that some of it will stick. Most of it is catchup, from stuff that didn’t work within IBM. It’s not like she has some insanely great idea that no one else has thought of and she is pursuing it with any passion. We know from many other companies that results from innovation bear little relation to the amount of money spent. There’s practically no correlation in any of the studies. This would seem to suggest that throwing gobs of money at things may not be the right way to go. Throwing even more gobs of money may not help.

In listening to Rometty, her one passion seems to be transferring resources to shareholders. She’s very passionate about that. And the article shows us where that has led.

mrmeata: For so long IBMers have been screaming the facts.. only now has the press seen the sad truth because it shows up in the stock price.. glaring so that is cannot be swept under the rug. Ginni has decimated the company, eliminated the very sales technical support required to procure new business, crippled the services arm with layoffs and demeaned every valued employee by allowing them to be refereed to as inanimate object, “Resources”.. Imagine working for a company where you are afraid to make a major purchase because no matter what you know you are just a “resource” to be disposed of like yesterday’s trash?

In last interview she was unrepentant pledging to go back to the board to buy more stock- and referred to Warren Buffet as simply, “Warren”. I am glad she on a first name basis with Mr. Buffet.. but it seems she worries more about his portfolio value than IBM.. which she is morally and ethically required to serve.

Paying out stock dividends and plumping up the stock value to make it more attractive while contracting the company is in some ways nothing more than a high priced Ponzi scheme.. if not illegal than certainly misleading. The time for Ginni to restore honor to the office of the CEO is long past...she has disgraced the good name of IBM and must go.

mrmeata: 3 days ago IBM is buying back more shares after the stock hit a three-year low on Oct. 21 in the wake of Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty’s decision to scrap a long-held earnings goal for 2015. The company has already repurchased $19 billion worth of stock in the past four quarters to satiate investors and to reduce the number of shares in circulation, which helps boost earnings per share.

“We will continue to make the investments and changes necessary to manage our business for the long term and to shift to higher-value offerings,” Rometty said in the statement. “At the same time we remain fully committed to returning significant value to shareholders.”

The end of Q4 is approaching and this quarter isn't good.. Ginni should be out of money to buy back more stocks. It is time for IBM employees to stage a work slowdown until she is dismissed! The buy backs will come on the heels of yet more damaging layoffs.

Lee Conrad: From IBM Global Union Alliance: After months of public outcry, employee outrage and pressure on social media by the IBM Global Union Alliance, CEO of IBM Ginni Rometty, has at last “abandoned Roadmap 2015″, the plan to deliver $20 earnings per share by next year.

While IBM focused on out of touch “Roadmap” goals, enormous damage has been done to both employees and the company:

Tens of thousands of employees’ have been terminated in “resource actions” around the world.

Work has been off-shored, decimating employee population in countries such as the USA and Australia.

Customers have lost confidence in the company.

IBM employee morale is rock bottom.

Although “Roadmap 2015” has been abandoned, job cuts, pay cuts and a toxic work environment mean that the pain is likely to continue for IBM employees.

Head of UNI ICTS Alan Tate said “The IBM Global Union Alliance strongly opposed Roadmap 2015, and we will continue to fight against job cuts and detrimental actions against IBM employees. It’s time IBM executives listen to their employees and the unions, before this once great company is lost to executive greed and incompetence.”

Brought to you by Alliance@IBM CWA Local 1701.

Steve Denning: Dear Lee Conrad, Thanks for your comment. I agree that it’s tough to be an innovative company when you have management practices such as my article and your response describe.

Perry Roads: “Rometty of course didn’t invent “Roadmap 2015.” She inherited it from her predecessor CEO, Sam Palmisano” – When are you reporters going to recognize that Ginni Rometty was Sr. Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Strategy in 2010 when “Roadmap 2015″ was conjured up? Do you think she had nothing to do with its formation? C’mon – stop giving her a pass on that.

Steve Denning: Dear Perry Road, Thanks for your comment. Not sure Rometty would agree that my article gave her a pass. Whatever role she had as VP for Roadmap2010 or Roadmap2015, her chance to declare herself is when she took over. Then she made clear that she was doubling down on it. So Palmisano launched the approach and Rometty has embraced it with gusto. No pass.

Nair Ajit: IBM had been successful for several decades. At that time IBM was much admired and others wanted to emulate it’s business model. IBM had a formula that was well executed and with passion, focus the whole company on clients’ success, build an attractive environment, treat employees well so that they deliver their best and become an asset in the community. Innovation was in the DNA of IBM when employees were motivated and focused on the market and clients.

When IBM hit a road bump, the recovery plan clearly had to be on a renewed client focus and delivering superior value again. Unfortunately the baby was thrown out together with the bath water. The environment deteriorated to a point where it would no longer be considered an attractive place for talented employees.

It lost a lot of goodwill by moving out drastically from communities it served well for a long time and lost it’s soul in the process. And successive CEOs instead of stepping on the pedal and displaying strong leadership became dependent on the one group that lacks creativity and leadership, the finance folks at IBM.

It is not surprising that IBM had to explain it’s results. Unfortunately once it embarked on this slippery slope it became a journey of manufacturing results through unconventional means like share buybacks, tax gadgets, cost cutting and drastic off shoring. Ginni did not create this formula but if she was a visionary leader she would be able to decipher reality and in touch with the true sentiment of the vast majority of IBMers.

It will not be easy to recover because what remains of IBM is just a shell, the balance sheet is poor because of all the share buybacks. Few talented employees remain; the environment has become too shabby to attract new talent; no longer leader in any high growth area; lost goodwill of the clients and partners.

This did not happen overnight but over several years in the misguided notion that financial engineering will get IBM to its ultimate goal. IBM was an American icon but perhaps today the impact of IBM’s failure would be felt far more extensively in India than the US. Perhaps Ginny should consult Modi for ideas.

steve polychronopolous: I agree that Sam had a lot to do with this mess, but as others have said Ginni is just as responsible as she was a SVP during the planning of Roadmap 2015, and at any time during her tenure as CEO she could have halted this madness. But, if the intended purpose of Roadmap 2015 was to only provide the shareholder with value and things just went awry, I could be a little more understanding because running a large corporation is not easy and returning profits to the shareholder is important. However, shareholder value was the not intended purpose of Roadmap 2015; the real purpose of roadmap 2015 and Ginni’s involvement was much more corrupt.

There have been many instances over Ginni’s tenure where she has shown her true colors, but the most blatant was this year. It started with a highly publicized comment where Ginni pretended to take one for the team by refusing her bonus. Then throughout the year Ginni continued to prop up the house of cards with promising her EPS targets; however, during this time she never put her money where her mouth was by purchasing IBM shares. Finally, less than two months before black and blue Monday she profits with millions of dollars in corrupt stock options – who needs bonuses when you are rewarded options for meeting easily corruptible metrics? Unfortunately, but very predictable, many of her senior execs followed suit.

And while Ginni was funding snow removal of newly constructed asinine helipads, proclaiming her delusions of grandeur, and spending her financially engineered loot, IBM’s quality of services, software, and hardware deteriorated due to a lack of resources, significant number of employees were laid off: most employees received no bonuses, and shareholders saw their investment slip by ~10%.

When one couples her tenure as CEO with her past performance as member of the AIG board, it becomes clear what Ginni is good at: looking after herself and few of her buddies while pillaging everyone else. Ginni was a member of AIG board during AIG’s finest moment and was responsible for rewarding copious sums of loot to the incompetent AIG execs.

Srinivasan Ramaswamy: Steve, Thanks for a well researched and comprehensive article on IBM’s travails. This one combined with your earlier one – “Why IBM is in decline ” on May 30th should give the reader enough perspective on the magnitude of IBM’s problems.

motiv: IBM’s move to cloud is led by people who have been working for IBM for decades and still trying to apply old recipes to a new model they don’t fully understand. When they acquired SoftLayer it was all about “leaving SoftLayer’s business model and management team untouched”. Yeah, sure, they were probably the only one people to understand the cloud computing model from a business perspective. But this is not going to last for long; the “bluewashing” wave is coming onto SoftLayer as well. We’ll see what remains. IBM Software division is led solely by net new license sales therefore is not able to take the shift to the SaaS model – sales forces are discouraged by their management, unofficially, to sell SaaS or PaaS, even if the customers are requesting for it, so they can force selling classical licences.

When it comes to Infrastructure as a Service, the strategic outsourcing division of IBM is fighting with every possible nail and knife to limit any possible adoption of cloud by their customers; in a fear this will completely eat their traditional outsourcing revenue. To the point, these same IBM outsourced customers are often starting to consume cloud solutions from competitors as IBM does not move fast and convincing enough on this area.

Badly defined sales plans ensure that the IBM Services guys, the Software guys and the business consulting guys are all except being motivated to work together creatively on the same account – this might be even truer in the area of cloud computing than before. There’s an enormous shift to make in the way IBM is being managed. But as you state, maybe the most important is to put back the customer, and not the shareholder, at the center of the business. And this last statement is very much valid for MANY different companies. So what is the society we want to live in next ? As a whole?

Ray Depp: I agree with everything you say, except one, the start of this is when the little Napoleon like ruler, Lou Gerstner, was brought in. It was Lou that brought in Sam as CEO, it was Lou that decided to start pushing software and services, in other words following the crowd at the time with no thought or strategy other then follow in an area that others made successful.

Services is labor intensive and historically had low profit margins. Lou took the company to 50+% services and was no longer diversified in its skill. Lou stepped out because it was beyond his ego to sign anything attesting to his responsibility that the results of the company were accurate due to Sarbanes-Oxley.

Sam just continued on the path that Lou started with no strategy except buy backs and more financial engineering. All the IBM employees at the time knew it, but if we said anything we were nay sayers and not team players.

Unfortunately for Rometty, the game is over, the cutting hit a cliff and went over and there is nothing to replace all the revenue lost because of divested business units.

Stockholders think that Apple applications are going to help, by the time IBM develops them , maybe in India, and they add in the IBM premium, those applications are going to cost more than a gold iPhone for each client.

The cloud is already a commodity and watson isn’t required by most businesses and when the business that can use them find out how much they cost, I think there will be a big surprise.

Unfortunately, IBM can no longer say it has the skill to do anything. The days of hiring the best and paying better than average are long gone. Anyone left at IBM is more than likely unable to find another job or just too close to retirement to jump ship.

If you want to play IBM in the market, I suggest a short, but then again, everyone knows now.

Steve Denning: Dear Ray Depp. Thanks for these valuable comments. I agree that the single-minded hunt for money for shareholders and the top executives began under Gerstner. We have now come to the end of that very short road.

FormerIBMer: Mr. Denning’s depiction of the state of IBM is dead-on. It’s unfortunate to see IBM’s slide, the impact on its great workforce (who once fully believed in what it means to be an IBMer), the values espoused by Mr. Palmisano and team, and clients’ falling interest in its products and services. Even Mr. Denning — who once was an IBM client in the heady days of the knowledge management buzz has done a 180 in his sentiment. What is most troubling in all of these equations is not the financial engineering but the human engineering that has taken place at IBM over the last decade.

The gap between what’s reported to Wall Street and the actuality of the “missed forecast” message each quarter has widened the gap between “classes” and has been a losing value proposition for the everyday IBMers. The constant drumbeat of monthly resource actions, cutting compensation for the US worker to fund overseas growth, pulling back from bonus payouts, removal of sales people from actual sales plans to place them on a quasi, growth-driven profit plan (funny IBM chose the name GDP), significant reduction of recognition dollars now replaced by social, peer-to-peer non-monetary thanks, and a general attitude of pushing the employee population to the breaking point of quit or smile and take a pay cut “for the good of the company.”

Unfortunately, Ms. Rometty and Ms. Gherson (current SVP of HR) have squandered their opportunity to re-invest in IBMers and reinvigorate the culture – choosing to apply the same tactics of Misters Palmisano and MacDonald (the former SVP of HR). Thankfully, I had the good sense of leaving IBM on my own terms years ago. I could no longer (in good conscience) be part of the “sticking it to the worker” mentality.

I had to go – to at least have a shot at getting my soul back. Had I remained I would have surely met Lucifer at the cross-roads — no longer believed in IBM’s engagement model – shareholder first, employee last.

Sadly, I continue to get emails, LinkedIn messages and phone calls from the great people that remain – all of which hate their jobs, have lost faith in the company and hope each quarter that the lay-off fairy and Road-kill 2015 will visit their department so they too can become Walmart greeters, Home Depot shelf-stockers or independent business people.

IBM you have lost your way, but worst of all, you have lost the trust in the one relationship that will define your success or determine your faith –the IBMer.

Seeking Alpha:

IBM Needs To Invest In People, Products And Processes — Not Paper. By Peter E. Greulich. Excerpts: IBM spent 9.50 times its 1966 net income over four years to produce the mainframe - $5,000,000,000 in research, development and capital investments. IBM spent 9.59 times its 2013 net income over fourteen years buying its own stock - $158,000,000,000 in gross share repurchases. Within the history of a single company we see two completely different leadership styles: one that was sales-minded and invested in people, products and processes; a second that was financially minded and invested in paper. These equivalent financial gambles have produced unequal results. Let's start with the '60s.
...

Unfortunately, for the first time since Tom Watson Sr. assumed control, IBM is facing a cultural crisis. Watson Sr. roaming the halls of today's IBM would make the same observation he made in 1914 - there is very little enthusiasm. Lou Gerstner used his 2002 book, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? to claim not only strategic and financial success but cultural. He deserves credit for the first two but not the later. Our business schools should teach all its students to read any business book - but especially self-evaluations by Chief Executive Officers - with a healthy dose of skepticism.

IBM's problems are rooted in the inequitable distribution of corporate profits between its four stakeholders. Gerstner exposed his shareholder-first strategy to his employee-owners in 1999 when he failed to provide a simple choice between two pension plans. By failing to provide a choice, he pushed IBM to the edge of its very first cultural crisis. Then Sam Palmisano leaped from this precipice grasping for shareholder-only rewards; and the fall impacted IBM's customers. The strategy continues with Ginni Rometty to such an extent that IBM's Smarter Planet initiative may be in jeopardy. IBM made the plant smarter in the '60s; it is not on that path today. Today it only has a marketing slogan with minimal forward movement for a $100 billion corporation.

Ginni Rometty inherited from Louis V. Gerstner and Samuel J. Palmisano a cultural disaster founded in shareholder-first and -only strategies. The strategy of her predecessors desired nothing but 1099-MISC employee relationships, lowest-cost product development (at the expense of time-to-market, cost-of-ownership, usability, quality and overall competitiveness) and meets-minimums customer service. ...

IBM needs to invest in its people. IBM needs to do more than just say that it is abandoning the 2015 EPS Roadmap. Past decisions to save pennies at the employee-owner's expense are a drag on earnings. Both Gallup and Deloitte have shown the business impact of employee-owners that are, as they say, engaged or passionate; Watson Sr. looked for enthusiasm. You get the idea — employee morale matters.

These are a few actions that would immediately send the right message to IBM's employee-owners:

Reverse the 2013 401K policy change requiring a person to be employed on December 15th of each year to receive the current year corporate match.

Start decentralizing and trusting first-line managers by eliminating the requirement of a senior vice-president level sign off on simple expense decisions.

Show executive trust in employee-owners by managing by walking around. Arms-length electronic jams are not enough. Face-to-face, one-on-one executive interviews are needed as there is a lot that needs to be heard.

Rename IBM's human resources department the human relationship department. Give it back the mission Tom Watson Sr. originally gave it when it was created in 1956 under Sara Means: help further the development of human relations and help our people who may be in unfortunate circumstances.

Finally, start anew by celebrating IBM's Traditional Centennial, and once again hold high what IBM knew for almost a century: its true competitive advantage is its people.

Selected reader comments follow:

InmanRoshi: Purely anecdotal, but I'm a longtime software developer. Everyone I know who has worked for IBM quickly became disillusioned because of their culture of incessant cost cutting measures. It's hard to invest your life in a company that is openly eager to outsource everything overseas and/or 3rd party staffing to save a buck. They send a message loud and clear that you are not hired as an intellectual investment, but rather purely a disposable commodity that they'll do away with at any moment's notice.

There is no allure to working at IBM for anyone under the age of 40, which is a problem considering IBM is no longer selling mainframes and superior technology but their intellectual firepower through software and consulting services. Why would any sought after intellectual talent choose to work at IBM instead of Google, Apple or Facebook, or any number of high tech companies where the intellectual talent is actually treated like the product rather than a cost problem to be solved?

Peter E. Greulich:InmanRoshi, anecdotal information becomes one employee talking to another, a former employee talking to their children and those kids talking to their fellow students at universities. Anecdotal evidence is far stronger than most realize - the wheels grind slowly but finely. True salesmen/women know that a company lives within the world's perception of their company. Shared anecdotes are the most powerful of perception influences.

How many people in the 20th Century chose IBM because of a person's personal story and conversely how many are not joining the 21st Century IBM because of the same process? IBM's Human Resources department needs to quit viewing human beings as resources. Humans as a resource started with Tom Bouchard — that Lou sets on a pedestal in his book — and has been going on ever since.

Here is one change that IBM can make that will have an immediate impact — change the name of the organization responsible for human morale to realize that IBM needs relationships more than it needs resources. That applies to customers, employees society and may soon learn, shareholders.

Keep the anecdotes coming! They are powerful and meaningful. Cheers, Pete.

Peter E. Greulich:
IBM prior to 2011 constantly measured itself in what was called IBM Global Pulse Opinion Surveys and benchmarked themselves against the industry. That stopped the year Sam Palmisano retired because the results were so bad. They said they were going to replace them with a lot of marketing words in their Corporate Responsibility Reports.
I would also recommend following two links above to Gallup and Deloitte. The industry is beginning to realize (again) that employees impact earnings per share. IBM's morale has been a drag on earnings per share and IBM has compensated for fifteen years with buybacks.

IBM employee-owner morale stopped being measured with the Pulse Surveys in 2011 - coincidentally with Sam's retirement. Also ask any IBM employee how effective "Sam's Jams" were that the press wrote about so enthusiastically. Jams could be effective — if as I point out above — it isn't used to keep employees at "arms length."

I left IBM 15 years ago shortly after they robbed me of my pension by "cashing me out" after 19.5 years for pennies on the dollar. I bled Blue Blood, like many of my coworkers, and enjoyed my time there. Lou Gerstner decided a "culture revolution" was needed and he began the downward spiral of IBM.

So, 15 years later, it is sad to see companies that did not exist then dominating in market niches that could easily have been IBM's. Areas like: cloud computing (aka SalesForce); social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc); browsers (Chrome, Firefox); mobile (Samsung, Apple, Dell); even communications/wireless. Many of these companies had little or no capital barrier to entry and IBM held many of the patents needed to excel. The fear of "competing" with clients in areas like advertising inhibited many actions.

Even in areas of raw technology and research, IBM has largely failed to capitalize on its strengths. Its patent portfolio is awesome, but few products come from the basic research. Areas like chip manufacturing could have led the way to improved battery technologies, solar panels, biochemicals, etc.. Sad to see they had to "sell" their once state-of-the-art chip manufacturing to and pay them to take it!

IBM needs to stop share buybacks and start investing in technologies and/or companies that are shaping the future of information systems and social enterprises.

It used to be that IBM was in the top gainers on Wall Street...for guidance. Maybe leadership should review that list and contemplate the difference in the strategies of those top 10 versus IBM's. Sad indeed.

IBM is getting what it deserves for how they're treating their talented pool of US engineers and off-shoring of innovative talent. This is no way to run a tech company that needs to stay ahead of everyone in the Valley.

Bloomberg:

IBM's Rometty Under Pressure to Revive Tech Giant After Plunge.
By Alex Barinka. Excerpts: International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) surprised investors yesterday by scrapping its 2015 forecast and projecting that earnings will decline this year, the first drop since 2002. The shares plunged to a three-year low.

That’s left investors and analysts asking: How can Chief Executive Officer Rometty give a 103-year-old tech giant new life? IBM has so far failed to move into growth areas like cloud computing fast enough to make up for a decline in its older hardware and software businesses. Other technology companies that haven’t moved quickly enough have taken more drastic action this year, with Hewlett-Packard Co. saying it’ll split in two and EBay Inc. planning to spin off PayPal. ...

What Rometty needs is growth, which is easier said than done. While IBM’s big future bet is on cloud computing, that business is only about 3 percent of the company’s annual revenue. Meanwhile, services and software are no longer the savior they once were to make up for declining hardware demand. ...

For now, IBM is mostly facing more urgency to add business customers, cut jobs and other expenses, divest more low-margin businesses and make more acquisitions to prove it can catch up to the industry’s widespread changes. After 10 straight quarters of falling revenue, IBM wants to shift its software portfolio to the cloud, where customers host technology in remote servers instead of onsite. The company also needs to battle pricing pressure on the services business, IBM’s biggest.

IBM stopped investing in the employees long ago, and only tries to please the shareholder. When the relationship is lopsided like that, shareholders should not expect much from the employees.

Ginny talks a good game about being customer focused but doesn't pay people for it. There's absolutely no money in finding an opportunity for another sales rep. People — especially sales folks — will do what gets them a reward and IBM doesn't reward customer focus.

IBM has abandoned its roots...the Basic Beliefs...that allowed it to grow into a remarkable company to work for and into a remarkable company to trust.

I left Big Blue a couple of years ago in despair. I just couldn't feel proud of what I was doing and how the customers were treated. Also, staff were treated as disposable assets (I am still amazed that we had 'serial numbers' instead of 'employee numbers'). Unless IBM starts showing true customer focus and gets rid of its internal culture issues, the future looks grim (half the people in the organization seems to be there to stop the other half achieving, and the concept of blue dollars vs green dollars stops internal teams helping each other.)

If you look at successful companies, as IBM has been for many years, you will see at the deepest root of their success, happy employees. Happy sales teams sell more, even more when they have the best and most creative products. And happy engineers produce the best products. Happy service teams can more easily delight their customers. Then management becomes a breeze, as all gears are lubricated. Productivity goes up. Customer value and loyalty is a consequence. Share value is the final result. You cannot have the end result without the intermediate products, contrary to what some leaders may think.

I began my career w/IBM in 1967 in the FE division as a Customer Engineer. I had many, many small to medium size companies in "MY" territory. They were "MY" customers. I liked them to believe my existence depended on their satisfaction. In return, my IBM managers looked out for my career and were on a first name basis with my growing family. (Three kids in four years. Does anybody remember getting a silver baby spoon with baby's name engraved from Armonk?) I also remember discussion about not being able to be called an "engineers" because so many of us didn't have degrees, but we had the ability to satisfy customers. After all, "Customer" was my first name.

Managers I worked for, in return, moved me to another branch closer to my mother's location when she began to have old age problems and travels back and forth were very time consuming. They also moved another CE on a temporary assignment to Rochester, Minnesota when his wife became seriously ill and she could be closer to the hospital there. I can think of lots of stories like these of "the old days" of IBM management. It is appropriate that the highest honor awarded to a CE was the "IBM Means Service Award".

Historically IBM's great advantages were all around the way the company invested in it's people and in R&D / Development of the technology. Over the past 10-15 years investment in both areas has been reduced and instead profits have been spent on share buybacks to boost earnings per share and return cash to stockholders (including the large number of stock options held by senior management). As a result the internal culture in IBM has become more self centric ("my career", "my results", "my performance / sales earnings"); not centered on our customers and the good of the company and given the way the company treats people who can blame them!

IBM is now paying the price for this. I think what is needed is new leadership who can clear the board and start again—as Gerstner did. The pre-Gerstner IBM had many faults; we were certainly too internally focused and ignored many of the developing trends in the industry, so it's not simply a matter of going back to the old days. But in the end the interface with the customer resides in the people in the front line. If they do not have right culture, the right skills and the right attitude then you can have all the great technology in the world and no one will want to buy it from you (or at least they will not buy it a second time).

Listen to the news...Google, Facebook, Amazon. IBM is irrelevant today.

There are probably many reasons to explain such a terrific situation for IBM. But as a former but recent Partner, I need to mention "short-termism" as a huge cause.

This is nothing sudden. Ginni was handed a bomb with the fuse burning. Look at the last several years' results. Every single year and quarter showed increasing profit—and decreasing revenue. How did they do this? How did they get greater profit from smaller revenue?

By outrageous attention to costs. Need to take a class? Sorry, we don't pay for that any more. Need pens or pencils? Sorry, we're not allowed to order those any more. Traveling to Manhattan? Here's a per diem—sorry it doesn't cover your expenses. This was a train wreck waiting to happen. Too bad for Ginni that it happened on her watch.

The "three envelopes" story comes to mind.

I loved the people I met at IBM when I worked there ”really I appreciated so much the cool and intelligent people around me. However a few incidents stick in my mind that I think point to an organisation where decision making is not entirely rational:

I was client facing. I never managed to get any business cards printed to to cost controls.

I once had to fly from Manchester to London to meet a client. It's normally a (direct) 30 minute flight that costs £200 approximately. The travel function tried to make me fly via Isle of Man to London on a budget airline which would have taken about 4 hours and involve a change of plane, just to save £10. I did manage to find my way out of this route, but it took some effort.

I was sitting opposite a colleague and heard him say to someone "one of these days I expect that when I come to the office I will have to put money in a machine to get power for my laptop". Obviously this is just a silly joke — but does speak volumes about the culture that people even make jokes like that.

IBM's customers are disgruntled and IBM knows it. As I covered in a previous article IBM dropped from its 2008 IBM Annual Report that simplifying and streamlining its internal processes had improved client satisfaction.

Customers are tired of it taking too long to propose, prototype, price or even renew an IBM software solution. Simplicity sells; complexity impacts revenue and profit.

Customers are exhausted by the cost of maintenance and integration nightmares of upgrading IBM's middleware software. IBM has in many ways created the cloud market through its own lack of integration, poor ease-of-use and hidden long-term costs of software maintenance. IBM has raised these costs so high that the cloud is a viable cost-effective solution for many — even if it might not be secure enough.

Customers are fatigued by IBM's internal corporate policies that destroyed a professional sales organization — one that in the past provided timely and insightful solutions. IBM tells its sale force to sell solutions, yet its own internal practices have resulted in a customer-facing employee turnover percentage that would embarrass a fast food restaurant.

There are no more true-blue IBM accounts. IBM's greatest moat — its customer relationships — has been drained and its outer walls — its technology — are now under attack.

IBM's customers are weary of the on-going battles.

IBM's employees are disengaged and IBM knows it. As I covered in a previous article, IBM highlighted for seven straight years that it was simplifying and streamlining its internal processes. It claimed it was improving sales force productivity, even though revenue per employee — the primary measurement of sales force productivity — has been flat for more than two decades.

IBM's sales force is not engaged. IBM's employee-owners are doing their best, but the corporate leadership treats them paternalistically — creating dependence by restricting their responsibilities, abilities and freedoms. IBM makes all decisions for them and their managers. Expense not revenue is at the heart of every decision. The IBMer of today is transaction oriented — tell me what to do and I will do it because performance doesn't really matter. The word THINK is a lost memory.

The last IBM Global Pulse Survey to measure employee morale was done in late 2010. It was not an easy read for someone that cares about IBM. Evidently few ask to see the data as even the Harvard Business Review publishes articles as if it were a positive (How IBM Is Changing Its HR Game); which it wouldn't do if anyone saw the actual data. IBM gathered the data and promptly deposited it in the nearest trash bin. Now it doesn't even bother gathering the data.

IBM's human resource organization over the last fifteen years has been nothing but the right arm of finance. Gallup's research in the State of the American Workplace has shown for decades that disengaged employees impact a corporation's bottom line. A 2010 update, entitled Employee Engagement and Earnings Per Share, documents the impact on earnings per share. Human resources needs to carry this article into its meetings with finance. Their failure to stand up for the IBM employee has cost IBM at least $156 billion over the last fifteen years.

IBM employees are disengaged and discouraged, and IBM doesn't care.

Associated Press, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal:

IBM Turns to Familiar Source of Relief: More Buybacks. By Steven Russilillo. Excerpts: International Business Machines Corp.'s big stock drop over the past several weeks is a buying opportunity, according to IBM. The struggling tech giant announced Wednesday it boosted its buyback plan by $5 billion, a move that comes after Big Blue’s stock price tumbled to a three-year low last week following its 10th straight quarter of flat or declining revenue. ...

For years, investors mostly turned a blind eye to IBM’s underlying trouble and boosted the stock price due to its shareholder friendly policies.

Buybacks can reduce a company’s number of shares outstanding, and can cause earnings per share to increase at a faster pace relative to actual profits. Critics say companies should use their cash more efficiently, such as investing in research and development, or to increase hiring.

IBM currently has fewer than one billion shares outstanding, compared with 2.3 billion in 1993. But now, investors appear to be focusing on bigger issues hindering IBM. The company ditched a key long-term profit outlook last week in conjunction with its disappointing quarterly results.

Seeking Alpha:

IBM: Financial Engineering 101 Says This Is Bad. By Josh Arnold. Excerpts: However, since the financial crisis IBM has seen its free cash flow (FCF) decline pretty steadily. We can see that in particular, 2013 and this year have seen fairly pronounced declines in FCF as IBM's business has struggled to keep pace with demands of shareholders. IBM isn't the well oiled machine it once was as arrogance and a dinosaur mentality has relegated it to second tier status among large tech companies today (my opinion, please don't tar and feather me in the comments). At any rate, no one can argue that IBM's business is in a steady decline and that spells trouble for capital returns. ...

The problem is that IBM's declining business is leaving less and less money available to continue this virtuous cycle of retiring shares to inflate the value of the remaining ones and since IBM's business can't hope to keep pace with Wall Street earnings estimates, the only way Big Blue can save its own bacon is to continue to blindly buy shares whether it can afford to or not. ...

This all poses a significant problem for IBM longs because a stock that is built on financial engineering only works when the engineers are still improving EPS. IBM simply can't afford to do it the same way it once did and now that its FCF has declined so steadily we see buyback authorizations starting to dwindle as well. The dividend is making up an increasingly large portion of IBM's FCF and that is not good news for buybacks or EPS growth. IBM's FCF situation has set it up to miss EPS estimates because its business is terrible right now and without inflating EPS by retiring shares, there isn't a lot to like here.

Seeking Alpha:

How Microsoft Pushed IBM Out Of The Enterprise. By Alex Cho. Excerpts: By now, almost everyone knows that IBM reported a pretty poor fiscal quarter. Going forward, IBM needs to re-orient its organization to be far more focused on innovation in key markets that matter and look for ways to divest some of its non-performing segments. Otherwise, IBM will continue to report quarters in which it misses earnings results. ...

Microsoft pivoted into the enterprise space with Windows Server back in the mid to late 1990s. That was the beginning of the end for IBM's hardware segment. The added standardization, paired with powerful middleware and ongoing support from Microsoft was what made various IT departments shift their resources away from UNIX-based systems, the type of stuff IBM created. So, in a sense, Windows offered both data center and individual PC licenses at prices that various IT firms could hardly compete with. Not to mention, Microsoft brought on board various PC OEMs to be distributors for various hardware systems that ran on Windows Server as a backbone and various Linux versions as a tertiary OS.

I recently talked to an insider, but basically, he stated that neither Oracle nor IBM could create a hardware business running Windows OS. It just wouldn't be profitable, and it's for those reasons I'm fairly convinced that the ecosystem shift away from legacy OS/middleware into more standardized OS ecosystems in the server space will continue. Basically, what Microsoft is doing on the software side of both datacenters and individual PCs bars entry from long-time competitors in the space, and since many of the applications work on Windows PCs and Windows servers, by extension both the hardware and software component is better handled by the Wintel ecosystem. ...

If you look at the software revenue breakdown, the company derives the bulk of it from middleware. Middleware is basically software that sits between the OS and various software programs that interact with it. In other words it is software that's sold to a very narrow market that needs IBM's software to make a UNIX or Linux based server run smoother (function with more applications). It represents the bulk of IBM's software revenue, indicating that the growth opportunity on the software side is limited to the number of systems that IBM can sell using IBM's more proprietary OS. In other words it's a shrinking market.

Also, IBM does not sell that many consumer facing applications. Unlike IBM, Microsoft took the initiative in software applications decades ago. Microsoft launched Excel in the mid-1980s and combined it with a couple of productivity suites and sold it as a mass market product. Now really think about that. Many business schools would echo the idea of selling a specialized product to a narrowly defined customer base. Excel should have been sold to engineers, mathematicians and programmers. But when you fast forward 20 years, everyone is trained to use Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Now not everyone will write a book, create accounting spreadsheets or will make a presentation. But in a sense Microsoft created a productivity tool that everyone is more or less familiar with. As a result organizations are willing to pay Microsoft bulk licensing fees to roll it out across an entire organization. Plus consumers are willing to pay for it, so they can use it on devices that they personally own. Microsoft faces the enterprise and the consumer. IBM faces the enterprise and ignores the consumer. ...

So in conclusion, IBM's software business isn't that stellar, and the number of non-branded systems will continue to trend higher. Furthermore, IBM isn't very competitive in the cloud space. On the software side, it sells middleware, not applications. So IBM really isn't positioned well in many of the markets that it competes or derives revenue from. Therefore, investors should sell or avoid the stock.

“IBM is like a huge, slow and old elephant. Once it used to be a great company...”

Current Employee — Project Manager. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 8 years).

Pros: Ideal place to grow your professional network and work together with great minds. Also you have chance to participate on free internal IBM provided trainings. Great place to learn how to work in a multinational company and in a matrixed organisation. Good for first employment.

Cons: Compensation is not the best comparing to other companies in the industry. If you want to be a top performer it's really hard to keep the work/life balance on a right path. If you're sick of processes and bureaucracy, then it's not your place.

Advice to Senior Management: I hope Jeff Smith will shake you up, guys!

“Great place to start but not to stay”

Current Employee — Software Sales in Atlanta, GA. I have been working at IBM (more than 8 years). Pros: Great co-workers. Access to lots of learning resources. Excellent conferences and training. Cons: Weak executives (blame and fire the troops, never take responsibility.) Too many managers and lifers. Too much process, slow in a fast moving industry. Below average pay. Advice to Senior Management: We need more autonomy, less supervision.

“A very mixed bag”

. Current Employee — Software Engineer. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

Pros:

Big company resources

Progressive company culture

Diversified product set allows for general stability and multiple opportunities

Pay has been consistent despite down economy

Linux.

Cons:

Far too much cost-cutting to make (apparently arbitrary) numbers

Top-down driven decision making with poor communication. Hard-to-understand directives coming from the heavens without explanation.

Bonuses have been disconnected from personal achievement, resulting in no real incentive to work hard any longer

Fear or inability to fire low performers results in a company full of people just "doing enough not to get fired"

Inability to reward top performers enough relative to how hard they work

Spend money on things that help employees do their jobs.

Astoundingly bad internal helpdesk support.

Advice to Senior Management:

Figure out how to reward people who are trying to do the right thing.

Figure out how to make sure people who consistently avoid doing the right thing don't get rewarded

Let personnel work from home if they want to; most communication happens through the chat service even when we are in the office

Invest in better internal infrastructure and internal support.

Better internal helpdesk support.

“Nothing special anymore — Sr. PM, northeast US”

Current Employee—Senior Project Manager in Northeast, NY. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

Pros: Like many other reviews, the work-at-home option is a great perk. I spend a lot of phone time (and some face time) with a great group of coworkers

Cons: Once IBM was a special place to work. I don't doubt that things had to change, but IBM has changed so much that now it is just a run of the mill employer — actually worse than that, since they so aggressively try to cut back on the workforce and everything they provide the workforce.

I don't know why it took the markets so long to realize how deficient and how self interested the senior management really is. But now the cat is out of the bag.

Advice to Senior Management: Well...there's not much grounds for optimism. My only hope is that we get better goal making out of Armonk to replace the ruins of the 2015 Roadkill.

“Missing motivated people”

Current Employee — Ops Leader in Brno (Czech Republic). I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 3 years).

Pros:

Opportunities to gain lots of experience and skills mostly by doing, not by learning as you don;t really have time to read.

It it self sufficient. It has all the tools necessary to do the job.

Cons:

Too much work for one person.

Too many processes, too many things to read, too many rules and exceptions, sometimes too many roles, responsibilities and expectations.

The amount of work and the frequent changes that are happening is making everyone feel overloaded. On top of that you are underpaid and IBM expects that a bonus per year for PBC 1 will make you happy (if lucky).

You start working in IBM with lots of enthusiasm and excitement sometimes even overtime because it's reputable company, known in many fields, and you think it's worth it, so you give it your best, but you realize, no one really cares what you do. I mean sure, your manager may notice you, but he can not reward you financially because he doesn't have much authority over finance.

The other let down is the environment, the people you are supposed to work with. Most people do not care anymore or don't have time for any extra task, they just do what they have to do whichever way possible but mostly you need to escalate them so that they do it.

Simple tasks are done with very long unnecessary delays.

Quality is not a priority, and the management is becoming poor, the outcome is that the general morale of employees is poor. Even senior managers feel it.

Advice to Senior Management: IBM should first take care of its internal customers, before it could take care of external customers. Create a solid organization from within. Create better way to evaluate employees, to know which people to keep and support and which people do not suit their positions. Give employees reason to do their best. If you will cut jobs, then at least make sure that the job was at least mostly automatized, and not transferred to somebody else. Having everyone underpaid and loaded with 1 year worth of work will only have bad ramifications.

I hope to see IBM do the right things again. If the company strategy doesn't change drastically, then IBM is on a long downhill. You cant have satisfied clients with dissatisfied employees.

Time for Employee Jam?

“A dystopian tragedy (update)”

Current Employee — Project Manager in London, England (UK). I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

Pros: The ability to work from home. Still an OK severance package, although signs that HR are starting to manufacture poor performance reviews to get people out the door without the package. The ability to work from home. Still an OK severance package, although signs that HR are starting to manufacture poor performance reviews to get people out the door without the package.

Cons: It's not really clear what the company does anymore, aside from having a core competence in 'reinventing itself'.

IBM is expert at acquiring companies then milking existing customers. Over a few years all the value of the acquisition is destroyed.

The bureaucracy is something to be experienced, as are the internal IT systems. These are slow and fail constantly. The internal search engine is a joke — it takes ages to return useless results.

The sales process is the only thing that is important; delivery is seen as an inconvenient expense.

There is no point in working for promotion; people expect to be resource adjusted sooner or later.

Advice to Senior Management: Well done Ginni for finally scrapping roadkill 2015. Although, my suspicion is that it no longer became possible to keep up the facade. Although the share price has been hit, the market will return when it can see that the company is generating real rather than paper value.

The management knows via surveys that morale is rock bottom. Realize that whoever is left is good, so empower the grass roots. Don't start cutting staff — do an Amazon and pay no or reduced dividends (Roadmap 2019?) so as to invest in the future.

“A very bad work environment run by people who do not understand that employees are their most valuable asset.”

Current Employee — Engineer. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

Pros: A great deal of flexibility (in my job) to work from home sometimes, take time out for things like doctor's appointments, etc.

Cons: Extremely high pressure. Resources that are far, far below the level necessary to actually get your job (or your team's job) done. Poor and outdated tools, such as the software we use and the PCs and other hardware devices we use.

Constant layoffs, often of the most experienced and knowledgeable people.

Focus on "fighting fires" (which are often caused by the issues above) instead of sensibly planning and working on long-range goals everyone believes in.

Persistence in trying to make the company "successful" through financial engineering (stock buybacks, layoffs, accounting gimmicks) rather than sound practices of studying customer needs and providing products and services to meet them.

Salary has dropped relative to inflation every year for about the last 10 years, even though I am very highly rated every hear.

Advice to Senior Management: Make your people happy and give them a stable environment without threats and with the resources they need. If you do that, they will be on your side, will work hard, and will make you successful.

“Great people, great work, but treated like a number”.

Current Employee — Anonymous Employee. Pros: Great coworkers. A good portion of management was about personal growth and creating a great product. Cons: Upper management (4th line and up) was largely chasing money. They treated employees cheaply, like something to milk. The perks — no free coffee — don't really matter, but it says something about how the company sees its employees.

“Great company”

Former Employee — Anonymous Employee. I worked at IBM (more than an year). Pros: Solid company to work for. Cool employees. Good management. I had a great time working here and personally I thought working at IBM is what you made of it. Cons: Certain employees were very rude and brash. But they were few and far between, made it easy and simple to work and enjoyable to come into work everyday. I just tried to steer clear of those certain rude people.

“It depends where you are”.

Current Employee — Software in Yorktown Heights, NY. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

Pros: IBM is a big company. I have worked in a few different areas, and each is like a different company, with its own culture, and people. If you don't like where you are, and you're capable, there are lots of opportunities, lots of products, lots of places to try.

Cons: Top management has a focus on shareholders first, then clients, then employees. Once you recognize and accept that the word "customers" usually refers to shareholders, much of what upper management says makes more sense.

Advice to Senior Management: The people who leave are usually the best people. Not enough is done to keep top talent.

“Good people, disappointing policies”

Former Employee — Anonymous Employee.

Pros:

Very experienced people

Different and many opportunities to learn

I had all good managers

Can get good mentorship

Cons:

Company's policies make employee feel that they are not valued. Biggest disappointment.

Company's policies of regular resource action means less than needed number of employees are available --> continuous stress of work, job insecurity creates an unhealthy environment.

Some old employees can contribute to internal politics

Compensation: Three components: a) Base salary is at best average when compared to the market. b) Bonus is poor (no bonus is not uncommon). c) Stock options are not available. Poor again. Increments are low.

“This Ain't Your Father's IBM Anymore!”

Former Employee — Manager in San Jose, CA. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 8 years).

Pros: Wide variety of job opportunities, if you are one of the lucky ones to still be employed by "Big Blue."

Cons: The company seemed to have a policy of shedding as many US jobs as possible, and replacing the lost jobs with overseas or contract workers. My job was "sold" to a foreign company, but I still was expected to work just as hard or harder, with fewer resources.

Despite being one of the top-rated employees, I received a total of 2.5% raises over a 3 year period.

The defined-benefit pension plan was discontinued so executives could see their stock options soar in value, replaced with a far less generous defined contribution pension plan.

If you wanted to take an opening in another location, IBM would not compensate you for the move.

I was expected to work weekends at least once a month, without "comp time" off.

Policies were geared to the "politically correct," and if you held traditional values, you were not part of "the team," and your promotion chances were nil.

Advice to Senior Management: None—it's too late to save the company. They've sold their souls to the devil.

“Good people, poor work environment”

, Former Employee — Power Systems Sales in Washington, DC. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

Pros: The talent of people that you are able to work with in great and motivated. You have the ability to gain customers' attention and start a conversation easily by stating you are from IBM and I would like to talk to you about...

Cons: Cumbersome processes which make you feel that you are not in control or that your view point matters. Cannot reach fast to customers questions and always need to set expectations that solutions or answers may take several days.

Advice to Senior Management: listen to the smart field sales people and organize the company to help them meet and beat customer expectations instead of having them catch arrows for sluggish responses.

“IBM was a great starting point for my career...but growth can be limited”

. Former Employee — Senior Consultant in Washington, DC. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 3 years). Pros: IBM has great resources and my co-workers were fabulous mentors and friends to me. Cons: Most of my co-workers left to pursue more rewarding (both fiscally and task-wise) jobs. Advice to Senior Management: Align the incentive program so that the best individuals you have stop walking out the door.

“Decent place to start out (as an Intern)”

Former Employee — Anonymous Employee. I worked at IBM as an intern (less than a year). Pros: Friendly management, possible to get some paid time off for interns, even got to work from home a couple times as an intern. Cons: Oppressive corporate bureaucracy,;the culture is a bit outdated. If you are a young person looking to work at a hip modern company, this isn't it. Advice to Senior Management: To attract young people IBM needs to loosen its strict by-the-book approach to product development.

“Corporate Culture of Greed — Only concerned with Stockholders and 2015 Roadmap”.

Current Employee — Anonymous Employee. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

Pros: Vacation and paid holidays are still a premium if you can find a backup to cover for you; overall benefits are still decent.

Cons: Corporate greed has taken over; customers and employees are no longer top priority for this company unless you're a top executive. Executive pay and bonuses continue to rise; pay and bonuses for non-executive employees, band 9 and lower have been frozen.

Advice to Senior Management: NEVER punish the employees who are the paper pushers; administrative employees are the backbone of the company and they have been left behind in the pay scale. Corporate bonuses for people below a certain band were frozen while the company still made billions and executives and sales personnel maintained their compensation and bonus structure.

“You should keep looking”

Current Employee — IT Architect in Dallas, TX. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 3 years).

Pros: IBM is huge, there are a huge number of incredibly talented people. Some of them are IBM "lifers" that haven't worked anywhere else for decades. However, they are great resources and great to work with.

Cons: This is a dying company. They lay off incredibly talented people because they plan from the top without departmental input. They have no essentially no "tech" benefits: you will not see a raise, there is no travel, no training—not even coffee is provided to employees.

Advice to Senior Management: Too late.

“Very hierarchical”

Current Employee — Consultant in New York, NY. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than an year).

Pros: Great respectable brand and benefits.

Cons: Those at the lower levels especially are treated like a number and management does not care whether you work in an area you're interested in.

Advice to Senior Management: Align incentives better.

“Global opportunities”

Current Employee — Channels Manager in São Paulo (Brazil). I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

Pros: Home office and flexibility is allowed for some job titles and this is excellent for work-life balance. You will know people around the world, develop relationships and learn cultural differences. IBM is always innovating and is ahead of its competitors in terms of raising technologies.

Cons: The salaries and sales incentives are usually inferior comparing to competitors. Too much bureaucracies and processes that impact day-to-day work.

Advice to Senior Management: Negotiate your salary before you join, since afterwards it´s very hard to get any increase.

“A comfortable place to work 9-5”

Current Employee — Anonymous Employee. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than an year).

Pros:

Work from home policy is good

Compensation isn't bad

Large company so there are more opportunities to change
positions within the company.

Cons:

WAY too much process

Bad required software (e.g. must use IBM own software rather than a far better competing product)

Raises NEVER happen without changing jobs—negotiate a good salary when you get hired or be prepared to change teams/managers whenever you are due for a raise

Fragmented teams so theres little to no shared knowledge.

Advice to Senior Management:

Don't base employee reviews on a curve...just because a team has a high performer doesn't mean it must have a low performer. Comes across as a way to just keep from paying to keep good people by only allowing one outstanding employee review per team.

Don't make employees change jobs to get a raise. If one manager can pay more, then the current manager should be able to do the same.

“Horrible”

Former Employee — Regional Sales Director in Lincoln, NE. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 3 years). Pros: Pay was decent as well as the benefits. Cons: Horrible workplace management. Red tape, procedures...everything really. They destroyed everything that was once great by their purchase of Kenexa.

“Great minds, innovative solutions, research is king — clients are the winners”

Current Employee — Sales Specialist. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

Pros: Ideas to solutions; research and Watson operate like a high profile and well funded startup; alliances and acquisitions are continuing to transform IBM from HW provider to thought leader and problem solver.

Cons: GBS (services) has the talent, but some GBS leadership have their heads in the sand. Many arrogant partners who don't get pink slips that APs and worker bees get when the numbers are not where they need to be. IBM's benefits package is exceptional for the long timers; still pretty good and broad for the newer hires.

Advice to Senior Management: GBS needs a person-by-person review at the higher levels. Many are on their high horse, looking down on the day-to-day sellers. Need to figure out the B&P model to enable new and needed solutions (especially with new alliances and offerings—Apple+IBM will be huge when GBS can prioritize on the small time investment.

“Not a place to start your career”

Former Employee — Software Engineer in Littleton, MA. I worked at IBM full-time (more than an year).

Pros: IBM employs very smart software engineers.

Cons: I started my job right out of college at IBM, with high hopes unfortunately:

Pay was far below average with raises only going to the 'top performers'.

My manager was non-technical, had 20-30 people under her and honestly had no clue what most of her employees job's were. When review time came, she skimmed through what we wrote about ourselves and rated everyone as 'average' aka no bonus + no layoff.

Lots of layoffs which caused a very negative attitude around the office.

The work was boring. Being right out of college it's fun to work with new technologies; at IBM you're forced to use old technologies like Java and Dojo for web.

It's very hard to get into a leadership role unless you've worked at IBM for a long time.

No free coffee or anything for that matter. Honestly how hard is it to offer your employees free coffee?

“An American Icon”

Cons: Too many layers of management. Sales prevention at its worst. Employees (NOT management) are just numbers. Lifers get a free ride.

Advice to Senior Management: Take a look at the failing managers and make changes. There are no issues cutting worker bees, but executives seem to be immune from the swinging axe.

“Turn and run”

Current Employee — Anonymous Employee. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years). Pros: I love the work and the people. Challenging work environment. I can work from home whenever I want, but I don't abuse it. I actually more efficient working at home. Cons: The layoffs get very old, and if you are not part of the Cloud or Analytics then you are considered part of the old IBM with little raises. Advice to Senior Management: Get real.

. Former Employee —Technical Project Manager in Durham, NC. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

Pros: The company is so large that you have a lot of opportunity to have multiple careers at one company. You have the opportunity to collaborate with a lot of SMEs. There is flexibility in work schedule and working from home or office.

They have a very good continuing education program. The benefits package is awesome (health, vision, dental, 401K, pension and employee discount program).

Cons: Because there is flexibility to work from home it seems that it is the norm to be expected to always be connected, on and available. Work/life balance is very hard because of all the long hours required to complete projects. It can sometimes be hard to have a collaborative environment because you are being compared to your peers so most people are doing whatever they need to do to shine.

Advice to Senior Management: Really understand that people are the most important asset and not laser focus on the dollar bill (revenue). Do everything you can do to help your employees thrive and grow.

“Some great people, rubbish management”

Current Employee — IT Architect in Portsmouth, South East England, England (UK). I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

Pros: Benefits not bad, and time off flexibility good. For some there can be work/life balance but gradually being eroded. Some cutting edge and interesting but can be hard to find.

Cons: Appalling management and leadership, and company probably entered a long downward spiral. Salary can wildly vary between people and don't expect any pay rise.

Advice to Senior Management: Listen to and reward the hard working guys at the bottom. Stop lining your pockets/pension and share options. Share price is not as important as you think and quarterly results are killing company. Need a proper (non-financial) 5-year plan.

“Very inconsistent for Graduate roles”

Former Employee — Anonymous Employee. I worked at IBM full-time (more than an year). Pros: There are some great people working at IBM. A lot of very talented and inspiring minds. Cons: The Graduate Consultant role in the UK is really shoddy. It's basically glorified temp work for more money. Advice to Senior Management: Have a little more faith in your juniors.

“No longer a good company for hardware development”

Former Employee — Advisory Hardware Engineer in Austin, TX. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 10 years). Pros: Interesting work with top people and technology. Lots of flexibility in work schedule. Decent pay and benefits. Cons: No future in hardware development as IBM moves towards strictly software; lucky if you don't get laid off. So obviously not much chance to advance your career. Bad morale. They are constantly chiseling away at your benefits to save money and boost EPS to make targets. Advice to Senior Management: Good luck! It's difficult managing a shrinking team.

“Riding the death spiral.”

Current Employee — Project Manager in Guadalajara, Jalisco (Mexico). I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 5 years).

Pros: It's a good place to start because they're always in the market for dirt cheap labor. If you're fresh out of school, they will charge their clients for an experienced developer as long as you have a pulse.

Cons: Management hates employees; that's the only explanation for many of their compensation and promotion policies, openly forcing employees to engage in "competitive differentiation" which simply makes for the cutest hostile work environment; everyone trying to make their peers look bad and screwing everyone to cover their behinds. Instead of fixing problems, finding new amazing stuff to blame on each other. But in the end is the person who the manager likes the most (or hates less) who gets promoted.

Advice to Senior Management: The way your employees feel about you, is the way your customers will feel about you.

“Internship”

Former Employee — Anonymous Employee. Pros: Great for people who want to learn skills. Get awarded for good performance. You will be able to promoted if your manager appreciate the work. Cons: Lack of promotion and motivation. No one shares anything with others.

“Lots of opportunities but don't expect a pay increase”

Current Employee — Anonymous. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

Pros: It's a large company. If you put in and work hard, there are opportunities for advancement but it's not always easy or consistently based on merit.

Cons: Pay is not good. Don't expect annual increases or bonuses. Expect that if you work hard you will likely get rewarded by being given more work, promotions without actual pay or band increases, excuses and promises about what might happen in the future if you suck it up and work even harder. Also HR is solely there for the legal protection of IBM. They will exploit every gray area to get away with treating employees poorly. Beware of going on maternity leave. Like me, you could be starting your career over again when you get back. No protection and no employee rights.

Advice to Senior Management: Start valuing your employees rather than treating them as expendable expenses.

“Local team is awesome, entire company is not”

Current Employee — Staff Software Engineer in Böblingen (Germany) I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 3 years).

The local people management here in Germany is, what I have experienced, VERY good. The two first-line managers I have had here were both very understanding and interested in ME not in a working resource. I have always enjoyed enormous freedom be it working hours, home office, or hacking side-projects. This was due to mutual trust. Good stuff.

The fellow workers are very skilled to extremely skilled and the local people-to-people climate is usually pretty good.

Work is more "development" than "research and development" as the sign in front of the house says. But there can be interesting research aspects every now and then. The actual kind of work you do, of course, depends a lot on the product you work on. But generally it is hard core IT and usually fun.

Cons: Top level management is focused on their bonus and sees you as an annoying costly resource. Management is done without a lot of sense of realism ("build the best product in the world in two days"). Dilbert comics are very commonly glued to office doors; that should say it all. Also colleagues in America and India are sometimes capable and often not. Pay is definitely not above average. Bonuses and all kinds of goodies are virtually non-existent, as soon as they cost money. Not infrequently, local managers pay for things (grill parties, e.g.) personally. For example, we had a wonderful team hiking weekend — payed by ourselves.

“Stay away from GBS Service Line”

Former Employee — Senior Consultant in London, England (UK) I worked at IBM full-time (less than an year).

Pros:

IBM on your CV

Flexible work location

Cons:

Lack of HR, onboarding, off-boarding, timely pay of expense

Remuneration

Lack of organisation

Lack of leadership

Lack of teamwork

Lack of motivation O

Over-worked bureaucracy for getting anything done

Advice to Senior Management: Stop pursuing customer and sales lead and take a look around at your crippling organisation! People are complacent, and management just keeps their heads down and exclusively pursues sales opportunities with little regard to how their people are developing or could potentially contribute.

New on the Alliance@IBM Site

Comment 10/27/14:

Early PBC's being required for my group; not sure about others. Being asked to submit results but just by email; not using the PBC tool. Due today for manager alignment meeting on Thursday. Seems like a bad sign of upcoming RA. -Canuck-

Comment 10/27/14:

Great infrastructure. Bunch of BluePages records were deleted last night. Including many in the Rochester's (NY and MN). So anything Intranet is not accessible including Sametime, Connections, etc. -G. Tookus-

Comment 10/27/14:

-Heat Sink-, RAs in IBM are determined by three main areas: your age (if over 50 you will most likely be RA'd; your PBC rating, if three or worse; and how will did you play the political game with management. Without a union contract and being an at will employee you're at the mercy of management if you get RA'd or not. Join the Union now, before it's to late. -ANA-

Comment 10/27/14:

-Canuck-, my department was also asked to submit ten-month PBC progress outside of the PBC tool. We were told that this would be used to decide who gets RA'd and who doesn't. -Anonymous-

Comment 10/27/14:

Do we really still have "tremendous resources and knowledge" as the Forbes article states? The "SCAMS" initiatives (Security, Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, and Social) required (among other aptitudes) the very skills that were laid off in the STG RA of March 2014: technical specialists in security, software, and networking architectures and technologies.

The ignorant managers responsible for the final RA selection were lacking the skills to identify required skills and yet landed as curriculum managers for the 10% of the remaining IBMers whose skill sets were deemed deficient. (Was their pay docked by 10% for not knowing which skills were required to promote SCAMS?)

Ginni says Services are essential and yet the skills are hardly there to support them. Whoever tries to right this ship had better focus on resurrecting true technical education that began its slow death in 1992 so that IBMers can begin again to delight their customers. -Soothsayer-

Comment 10/28/14:

How long since the Lenovo deal closed? Lenovo is launching a full assault on the z and Power business. The Lenovo sales and marketing folks who came from IBM are now unleashed...this is something they have wanted to do for years. -G Tookus-

Comment 10/28/14:

@HeatSink: The decision about which divisions will be hit is made in the stratosphere somewhere. Once that decision is made, GMs and VPs are given numbers. Those numbers are broken down into directors, and then again into second-line managers. By the time it gets to the first line, the message is "RA in ?Q. Reminder: you may NOT speak of this to anyone. I need one name from you." (Or two names, or three names. Whatever.) (The FLMs argue. They lose the arguments, in most cases.) All of those names are submitted back up the chain, adjustments made as needed, and Voila! the RA list. -16YrsAndCounting-

Comment 10/28/14:

This year's market-based adjustment (MBA) will not be based on previous year PBC result; instead only those employees with key skills will get the salary adjustment. Key skills being CAMSS. It is up to HR and management to decide whether or not a particular employee possess such key skills and deserve the pay rise. -MLF-

Comment 10/28/14:

@16YrsAndCounting — Very accurate, but you missed the all-managers call with HR (the one where you have to identify yourself to the operator and verbally provide a password) where FLMs are instructed they must "own the decision" when telling their staff they are RA'd and not pass the buck to more senior managers. -MoraleDied-

Comment 10/28/14:

After 36 years of giving my life to IBM, I must state that you must join the union. My departure was all about age, and the IBM legal system made you sign all forms about age. I pray and beg you all remaining souls to JOIN THE UNION. Too late for me! -Anonymous-

Comment 10/28/14:

Ginni, a motivated work force is worth its weight in gold. You have an unmotivated work force. I left IBM in 2013 and for the last 2 of my remaining years I finally figured out that there was no reward from IBM for going the extra mile. While I did not have a raise for the last 10 years it took me quite a bit of time to realize the lack of rewards. I left IBM voluntarily in 2014. Ginni, there was a purported old saying during the Soviet era that the government pretended to pay and the employees pretended to work. IBM is mimicking the old Soviet Union and history will tell you how that works out. Lastly, either you learn to reward your workers or suffer from their lack of performance, your choice. -Anonymous-

Comment 10/28/14:

Seems as though another layoff might be in the air. Receiving LinkedIn requests from the very few folks that I know who still work for IBM. Not surprising given IBM's last quarterly report. In retrospect, there is no way that IBM 2014 even comes close to resembling what IBM 1994 looked like. So sad to see a dinosaur die because IBM management did not care about the people who got the corporation to where they were in the marketplace. NO doubt, it is all about GREED! -Former IBM Accountant-

Comment 10/29/14:

It's been a while since I've looked at your web site, Alliance. I must say that you seem to be doing well and are continuing to reach IBMers all over the world. It's just too bad that US IBMers cannot see the value in what you keep telling them. I really don't understand US labour policies or their laws well, but from what I see, Americans are being "divested" of their labour rights by their own government. Is that the case? One thing I also noticed is that the IBM Alliance union seems to be ahead of IBM executives in their ability to understand Cloud technology! Bravo Alliance. We're all watching you do your best, over here. Keep up the good work! -UK former IBMer-

Comment 10/30/14:

I hear Keven Spacey was the guest speaker at a IBM dog and pony show is Vegas. Makes sense as so many IBM execs aspire to be like Frank Underwood—too bad they're not smart enough. -HouseOfCards-

Comment 10/30/14:

I've been with IBM 35 years and finally joined up. 29 raises in 35 years but only 2, 2% raises in last 10 years while incentive and overall pay declines almost every year. Management says my experience is not inconsistent with others. I guess I should be happy they haven't cut my salary yet...maybe after this post.

This week my manager sent us a PowerPoint showing our productivity targets. Exempt employees are expected to record 103.5% productivity or 2153 productive hours a year. If you have earned five weeks vacation, you are expected to work an extra 200 hours overtime to make the ratio. It appears the same applies to sick days, etc.

What a way for IBM Management to MAJOR in the MINORS vs. focus on improving morale and revenue. My solution was to join the union. I hope more do. IBM Profits have tripled in the last ten years while non executive employee compensation steadily declines, even before inflation. Feel free to use my name. -Steve Gaylord-

Comment 10/30/14:

PBC 3 doesn't necessarily "deserve it". Remember that there is a quota for PBC 3 recipients. Despite the fact that IBM has RA'ed anyone remotely a PBC 3 years ago, HR is FORCING managers to stick employees with PBC 3s. Yes, FORCING. There is a quota. A certain percentage will have to eat the PBC 3, deserved or not. The appraisal system with its negative quotas is beyond useless - it is demoralizing and damaging. -Anonymous-

Comment 10/30/14:

Ginni, the most basic question needing to be addressed by IBMers to customers is why to do business with IBM. IBMers of the past could articulate answers to this question because they were part of something that was important. As you and your predecessors shifted focus solely to the shareholder, the IBMer became nothing more than a resource to be actioned whenever EPS required. IBMers no longer have the passion needed to answer the question about why to do business with IBM. Ginni, you and your colleagues lost focus on the customer and the employee, two of the other three legs of the stool, and now you have damaged IBM to the point that the third leg of the stool, the shareholders, have now been impacted. Because of your complete lack of competence in running IBM it is time for you to step down. You have become the poster child for the Peter Principle. -Anonymous-

Comment 10/30/14:

Ginni, you probably are unaware of how the Roadmap affected business so let me provide an example.

When I joined Advanced Technical Support in the US I was appalled that I could not visit a customer without 3rd line expense approval. My job was Technical Sales. I was supposed to sell technical solutions to customers DIRECTLY.

My ATS management was so proud that he made his expense budget every year. Conversely, the rank and file were shocked at how little customer interaction we had. It was like having a heavy weapons reserve unit that was prevented from going into battle because bullets were too expensive.

So, Ginni, your directions on expense control were carried out by your management structure without regard for the need to actually sell something to a customer. You totally mismanaged the primary responsibility to the shareholder and that was to promote a healthy growing profitable business and not a crafty financial engineering business. Peter Principle in action. -Anonymous-

Comment 10/30/14:

Ginni, bless your re inventive heart. Could you please answer this simple question. Yes or No. Would you fly in a airplane or sail a ship that IBM wrote the code for? -Magnolia-

Comment 10/30/14:

I had the satisfaction recently packing up my technical knowledge, skills, expertise seeing the writing on the wall and left on my own terms. IBM came calling: We need you, WE REALLY NEED YOU! Come back!, COME BACK!.

Sorry, my dance card is filled. The deliverable will fail. You saw to that when you eviscerated the development and test organizations. Customers will be displeased; GTS will loose contracts. You have salted the earth; now reap what you have sowed. -gone-

Comment 10/31/14:

I wonder how many customers are aware that IBM has no backup facility or policy for its employee workstations. I've always been amazed at this. There's the useless My Help app which does backups, which are often corrupt, but IBM offers no external drives or cloud/external storage (where's all this cloud stuff we talk about?). Every consultant I've worked with (and I do ask often) does not back up their machines. That's a lot of billable customer work at risk, especially when you have employees that are disgruntled or just told they are canned. Unionize and fight for better working conditions! -WaitingForACallFromMyManager-

Comment 10/31/14:

I work in Engagement Solutions Management at IBM. It is pretty much understood that if you are working a deal that needs you, you may have to give up your Christmas or Thanksgiving Holiday, etc. Getting a potential signing by year end is more important to IBM than employees spending time with their families during the holidays. There are still a few managers that try to minimize that from happening.

Our Productive Utilization policy expects us to work on average more hours (2153) than there are working hours in a year. While it appears you can still take Christmas, Thanksgiving, other holidays and your "earned" vacation, if IBM doesn't need you on those days, you are expected to work enough overtime hours to make up for any non-productive time such as vacation and holidays, plus another 73 hours a year.

Is it any wonder we have seen attrition rates in the 20% range and most of those who haven't quit because they need a job, are looking elsewhere? -Steve Gaylord-

Comment 10/31/14:

Talked to a close friend today who is a second line manager. Being told that IBM Canada is laying off (not a furlough) many, many contractors. Looks like Ginni is going to stay the course. Put your seat belts on folks. -Rusty IBMer-

Comment 10/31/14:

@WaitingForACallFromMyManager The laptop is IBM supplied, configured and managed system used for IBM business. If there was a system failure, loss of data, it was IBM's responsibility to fix, restore not my mine. Ditto for servers. How many times do you find your Notes running or replicating from one or more back-up systems till the primary was restored. The latter illustrates systemic infrastructure failures and of IBM Global Account to provide quality service. -Anonymous-

Comment 10/31/14:

To the ATS guy... Yep, travel has been restricted since the early 2000's, but execs and managers travel multiple times a year to far away lands. You want to drive to NJ with your own car, and that request is denied. Use the phone we are told over and over. -Yes, Virginia that was a failure-

If you hire good people and treat them well, they will try to do a good job.
They will stimulate one another by their vigor and example.
They will set a fast pace for themselves.
Then if they are well led and occasionally inspired, if they understand what the company is trying to do and know they will
share in its sucess, they will contribute in a major way.
The customer will get the superior service he is looking for. The result is profit to customers, employees, and to stcckholders.
—Thomas J. Watson, Jr., from A
Business and Its Beliefs: The Ideas That Helped Build IBM.

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